Be Opened!

By Deacon Thomas Stephenson

September 09, 2018

When Jesus heals the man in today’s gospel, He says “Ephphatha”, meaning, “Be opened”. Did you know that each of us has had our own Ephphatha moment? At one point during the Baptismal Rite, the priest or deacon touches the ears and the mouth of the child being baptised and says “The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the mute speak. May He soon touch your ears to receive His word and your mouth to proclaim His faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father.” Most of us were baptised as infants or children, so we don’t remember that, yet the Lord still touches our ears every time we hear His word read, and we proclaim our faith at least every week here at Mass.

Hearing God’s Word is essential to maintaining and growing our faith. We may hear with our ears, but we also listen with our hearts. Sometimes, we have difficulty hearing what the Lord is saying to us. Not because our ears aren’t working well, but because there is interference, too much background noise, or a lack of understanding that limits our ability to really listen and grasp what we’re being told. It may be damage caused by things that happened in our lives that cause us to block out certain parts of God’s Word. Sometimes, it is because we are resistant to what we are hearing, unwilling to allow the Lord to truly open our ears and our hearts.

The location of the events in the Gospel is significant. Jesus has come to a place called Decapolis, a region of ten cities which was primarily pagan. A respectable Jew would have been unlikely to go there. However, the people there must have had some idea of who Jesus was, and that He might be capable of healing this man. So, his friends bring the man to Jesus. Jesus does not just pronounce the man healed, He touches the man’s ears and mouth. Jesus reaches out in many ways here –He is in a pagan area, He is with a man who, because of his disabilities, would be considered sinful even if he was a Jew, and He actually touches this man in order to heal him. Jesus makes the effort to go beyond the normal restrictions, to reach out to the outcast, and the man can now hear and speak plainly. This also reflects two of the blessings mentioned by Isaiah in our first reading: the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped…and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. Along with the others listed, these are blessings, healings that not only demonstrate God’s power, but also His mercy and loving care for us.

Just a quick personal note regarding hearing. I know I am not the only one here who has lost at least part of my hearing. For some of us, our hearing diminished as we aged; for me, it was damage caused by loud music and loud cars when I was younger. I resisted getting hearing aids for many years, and only fully realised what I had been missing once I finally got them. For a while it was my choice not to hear as well as I should. Bad choice. It is important to be able to hear clearly the voices of our loved ones, our family, and our friends. It is even more important to hear clearly the voice of the Lord. And for those who may have irreparable hearing loss, it is still essential to read the Word, and listen with the heart.

In hearing His word, we must also strive to understand it. The people in the Decapolis region would not have understood God’s word in the way that a faithful Jew would have. There would be no common frame of reference. Jesus’ healing spoke to them in a way they could comprehend without having a Jewish background. In Pope Emeritus Benedict’s book Introduction to Christianity, written long before he was pope, he retells a story based on one told by the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. It takes place in rural Denmark in the 1800s, where a travelling circus is approaching a town, and one of the wagons catches fire. One of the men, already dressed and made up as a clown, is sent to run ahead into the village to warn the people and get some help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would ignite the dry fields nearby. The people thought that the clown’s pleas were just an act, and he could not convince them that there was a real danger. They simply laughed and applauded. This continued until they realised that he was serious; by then it was too late, and the circus and the town were consumed by the fire.

The people heard the words, but their pre-conceived ideas prevented them from properly understanding them. Their frame of reference was not aligned with that of the person trying to communicate with them. Pope Benedict included this story as an example of what Christians, particularly theologians, but applicable to all of us, are facing in a world that has lost a fundamental, common understanding. It can be difficult to speak with others about matters of faith and morals. It takes effort for even for ourselves, living in the world as we do, to remain grounded enough to hear and to understand what the Lord is saying to us. We have many distractions that can possibly leave us hard-of-hearing when it comes to the Word of God, and mute when it comes to proclaiming that Word. The Lord is always available to us, to eliminate those obstacles, to restore our senses that may be closed, to open our ears and our mouths, as He did at our Baptism.

So let us ask God to mend all the ways we are broken, and open our hearts, so that the Word we hear with our ears may flow into and fill our hearts, for our salvation and His glory. Amen.